Semiconductor Marketing - Raj Karamchedu

So You Want to Build a Product Company?

Sometime in October 2003 something happened to me that still surprises me whenever I think about it.  In one of those passionate, opinionated, energetic and all consuming discussions that I usually have with my friends – mostly ex-bosses – on hiring the right people, on market sizing, on organizational dysfunctions, and especially on how and why startup life teaches us so many things about life, it suddenly occurred to me: “If you feel so passionately about all this, and since you have so many thoughts, why not put them on paper?  At least then you can stop monopolizing the conversations with your ideas and feel guilty afterwards?”  That made a lot of sense. 

Overcoming Technology-centric View

Often we hear exhortations from experienced business men and women and entrepreneurs: "Don't get caught up in the technology superiority," "think about the customer," and "inculcate customer-oriented thinking in your company." 

What they mean is you should strive to understand how your customer can put your product to use such that the technology disappears  but the experience remains.  The implication here, of course, is that the so derived experience is in the form of an additional benefit to the customer.

Nevertheless, those who are technologists by training, like most of us are, often wonder what's the big deal about this thing called "customer-oriented" thinking.  At the outset the exhortation implied in this buzzword appears as nothing but a janus-faced fakery.  On the one hand, it appears as if it is no special kind of thinking at all but just plain common sense.  On the other hand, it seems that anything that requires that much  special thinking couldn't possibly have a place in the normal business affairs with regular people and for heaven's sake it can't be all that complicated.         

So let us examine this thinking. 

A "Cognitive" view of Product Differentiation

Differentiation: A Phenomenon, Not a Concept

For most professionals in high technology industry, differentiation is a forced response. 
    The first time we heard of it, it was more likely presented to us as a necessary evil that we must wrestle with to survive in the “cut-throat” markets we are in.  And so we religiously put this acquired skill into practice whenever we break down the products in terms of their features, draw up a nice comparison table and show the superiority of our product over that of the competitor. 
    For most of us, the manifestation of the differentiation lies in the relative differences between the features of the two products.  The ability to claim, “We have a better feature” whenever we pull up our presentation foils seems to lodge itself in our minds as the goal we must aim for. 
    This is a problem. 
    A prevalent mindset in the high technology industry is the tendency to measure the superiority of a product’s feature in isolation, blissfully ignoring to elicit any connection whatsoever to the benefit.  This obliviousness is so rampant that it behooves a serious examination of the root causes of it.  Let us start with a few preliminary observations on this matter.